Inter-Agency Real Time Evaluation of the Humanitarian ... - alnap

IA RTE of the humanitarian response to Pakistan’s 2010 Floods crisis
activities were faced with difficulties in terms of initiating activities immediately after the onset.
For these organisations, funding was slow.
24. The emergency response fund (ERF) was activated in September 2010 to provide
international and national NGOs, UN agencies and the International Organization for Migration
(IOM) with rapid and flexible funding to respond to the floods. More than 30 projects were
funded for a total of 8 Million USD in the areas of Food, Health, Water and Shelter and Non Food
Relief Items (NFRI). However, national NGOs considered it was difficult to apply for as
procedures were not known to some NGOs, especially national ones, while others perceived the
procedures as being cumbersome. Generally, ERF was perceived as a funding mechanism for UN
agencies and INGOs and those that were granted funding considered that it took a lot of time to
be disbursed as compared to other bi‐lateral funding mechanisms, such as the OFDA RAPID.
25. Other clusters involved in nonlife‐saving activities faced serious difficulties in accessing
funds and getting their operations started. The expansion of number of clusters took attention
away from life saving actitivities (see also part 7). A funding overview is found in Annex 6.
26. OFDA, the largest donor to the Pakistan floods emergency response, was generally
praised as a donor allowing modifications to existing grants and flexibly adapting programs to
changing needs. It mobilized several funding mechanisms to facilitate organizations’ response.
In contrast, DFID had cumbersome procedures to approve funding for new partners as opposed
to for the larger organizations already in longer term partnerships with DFID. Initial ECHO
funding was redirected from the Internally Displaced Person (IDP) crisis in conflict affected areas
and funding was made available to organisations weeks after the floods with contracts being
signed in the second half of August 19 . Some actors felt ECHO funding was slow.
The international focus on funding the initial plan, and consequent flood plans, however meant
that the Pakistan Humanitarian Response Plan (PHRP) was taken out of the limelight. In fact, the
PHRP only received 25 million USD since its revision in July 2010, despite the imminent challenge
of addressing the needs of an estimated 2.6 million IDPs. This represents a major concern in a
country that is regularly and simultaneously exposed to different types of disasters.
27. While the launch of the initial response plan (including the initial appeal for 0.5 billion
USD) was swift, the revision process of the Pakistan Floods Emergency Response Plan (PFERP)
was slow, both in its formulation process and in terms of funding commitments. The PFERP,
launched on September 17 th in New York, requested 2 billion USD and represented the largest
appeal ever launched by the UN. However, this appeal was not officially endorsed by the GoP
19
The Pakistani Government uses the IDP category only for those affected by conflict or complex emergency (e.g. as
in KPK); those affected by floods are referred to as ‘flood affectees’. In this report the authors recognize the
terminology of the Pakistani Government, while still maintaining that ‘flood affectees’ are and should be protected by
international humanitarian law.
Riccardo Polastro, Aatika Nagrah, Nicolai Steen and Farwa Zafar
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